North Carolina Parole System Accused Of Blocking Release For People Who Committed Crimes As Children

This story was produced in partnership with WFAE, Charlotte, North Carolina's NPR News source. 

In the more than 40 years he’s been incarcerated in North Carolina, Brett Abrams has rarely faced discipline. He’s tallied just 11 infractions, the latest handed down by prison officials nearly 20 years ago.

Abrams is serving life in prison for the 1983 stabbing death of Kim Goodman, a 20 year-old Iredell County woman, after he was allegedly caught peeping at her while she sunbathed on the deck of her Mooresville home. Now 56, Abrams was just 14 at the time of the offense. In 1984, Abrams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and was sentenced to life with parole. During his sentencing, the judge suggested that the parole commission never grant Abrams parole, or should not release him until it was sure that he “has been cured of the emotional and mental disorders which prompt him to act with violence toward other human beings.”

Since 2008, Abrams has been on unsupervised work release. He now works full-time in a meat packing plant, where prison staff drive him each day and drop him off, a rare privilege resulting from his remarkable prison record. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a pastor signed Abrams out of the Orange Correctional Center to attend services at a nearby Baptist church. When the program restarted, Abrams gave up his spot so other prisoners could go out in the community, one of his attorneys said. His pastor described him as “not the boy that he was many years ago when his crime was committed but that he is a very respectful and responsible man now.”

Psychological evaluations conducted by state psychologists corroborate that claim —one noted that Abrams did not pose an “immediate risk” to the community. Given his success in prison and at work, Abrams would seem like an ideal candidate for parole.

But the North Carolina Post-Release and Parole Commission has denied Abrams release more than 20 times since 1993, even after a federal district court judge blasted the commission in 2015 for not providing people who committed crimes as children a “meaningful opportunity” to prove they’ve been rehabilitated. In Hayden v. Keller, judge Terrence Boyle ordered the commission to create a new parole process that would account for “diminished culpability” and “heightened capacity for change” in people who committed crimes as children.

Following a parole denial in 2020, Abrams filed a lawsuit in federal district court claiming the commission failed to comply with Hayden. In his complaint, Abrams argued that the commission held parole “perpetually out of realistic reach, ” downplayed his “continued demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation” and exaggerated the risk his release would pose to the community.

“As we detail in our pleadings, there’s no rhyme or reason for how commissioners are deciding,” said Jake Sussman, an attorney for Abrams and the interim chief counsel of the justice system reform team at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “There are no standards. There’s no shared agreement about what growth and rehabilitation would look like. And that is problematic when you have a statewide system.”

‘Dramatic shift’

Since the 1970s, discretionary parole, or parole granted by commissions, has declined in North Carolina and across the country. In 1980, discretionary parole accounted for more than half all prison releases nationally, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report. But by 2000, thanks to tough on crime legislation like “truth-in-sentencing” — requiring people to serve a certain percentage of their sentence, thus limiting the ability to reduce prison time through good behavior and rehabilitative programming — just 24% of all releases resulted from parole.

Reiko Hillyer, an associate professor of history at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and author of A Wall is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth Century, said that there was a “dramatic shift” away from the idea that people could be rehabilitated in prison and eventually return to society. “This shift in policy and rhetoric suggests a radically new view that people who’ve committed crimes are permanently dangerous, impossible to rehabilitate and deserve the most possible suffering,” Hillyer said.

In North Carolina, the parole population dropped by more than two-thirds in the 1990s, according to the DOJ report, the second highest decline in the nation. North Carolina eliminated discretionary parole for most people who were convicted of crimes committed after October 1, 1994, which contributed to the decline. In most states, parole rates have continued to drop.

Data related to people like Abrams, who were sentenced to life for crimes they committed as children, is limited. But between 2010-2015, only seven such people were granted parole, though the commission conducted nearly 200 reviews. Between 2018-2022, more reviews were conducted and an increasing number were granted parole — 34, or 9%, out of the more than 350 reviewed, according to court filings in Abrams’ case.

In 2021, Gov. Roy Cooper issued an executive order establishing North Carolina’s Juvenile Sentence Review Board which created another relief mechanism for people who committed crimes as children and were sentenced to long prison terms. In the order, which expires at the end of 2024, Cooper cited advances in brain science that show children who commit crime are less culpable and are more likely to be rehabilitated. So far, Cooper has only commuted the sentences of seven people recommended by the JSRB, though hundreds are eligible for relief.

Abrams petitioned the JSRB last year, but hasn’t received a decision.

The lack of backend relief in North Carolina for people who committed crimes as children comes despite decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court like Miller v. Alabama where the court ruled that the imposition of a life without-parole sentence on a 14-year-old violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The court cited research in developmental psychology and neuroscience demonstrating that “it is increasingly clear that adolescent brains are not yet fully mature in regions and systems related to higher-order executive functions such as impulse control, planning ahead and risk avoidance.”

More than half of U.S. states have now banned life without parole sentences for people who committed crimes as children — but not North Carolina.

Despite the legislative progress in other states and court rulings, “the idea that kids are less culpable is not as salient to some people as the facts of a particular case in front of them,” said Ben Finholt, an attorney for Abrams and the director of the Just Sentencing Project at Duke University School of Law. “People generally are aware that kids are bad decision makers, but they themselves can’t imagine killing anyone when they were 14, and they believe that just because kids can understand the broad outlines of right and wrong, that they should be held fully accountable for that conduct, no matter what the science says.”

Resetting the bar

In Hayden, the court noted that North Carolina’s parole system didn’t differentiate between people who committed crimes as adults or children. “Indeed, if anything, defendants have demonstrated that North Carolina’s juvenile offenders face harsher treatment during parole reviews because the young age at which the crime is committed may actually be used as a negative factor in parole consideration by the case analyst preparing the report for the voting commissioners,” Judge Boyle wrote.

Following Hayden, the commission implemented a plan that included 30-minute video interviews between prisoners and a commission member, the ability for prisoners to have an attorney offer evidence and call witnesses who could speak to their rehabilitation, and an agreement to issue denial letters with recommendations for what prisoners could do to increase their chance at parole.

In the spring of 2019, Abrams received a letter from the commission outlining three reasons why it denied him parole again. They wrote that releasing him “would unduly depreciate the seriousness of the crime or promote a disrespect for the law.”

They believed he still posed a risk to the community and needed to continue to engage in programming to increase his “self-awareness.”

“Basically, the Commission wants you to have more programming to increase your self-awareness and learn how to handle deep emotions that played a role in the commission of your crime,” Joy Smith, a case analyst for Abrams, wrote in the letter.

In order to handle the additional workload resulting from Hayden, the commission rehired Smith, who had retired in 2013, and assigned her the state’s entire caseload of people who had committed crimes as children. Smith joined the commission in 1991, and handled only two such cases in her more than 20 years as a case analyst. One of her cases was Abrams, who she described as an “excellent convict” following his first interview with a commission member in 2018.

By 2019, Abrams had already completed numerous training classes and certifications in prison.

For more than a year in the lead up to his 2020 parole review, Abrams met with a state prison psychologist, who thought the treatment goals were difficult to assess.

“He has been infraction free for 13 years, for example, so just how improving his ‘emotional regulation’ would be measured is not clear,” the psychologist wrote. He was concerned that their sessions could “become an endless chase for a ever-shifting (or elusive) set of treatment goals,” but nonetheless met Abrams for more than 20 sessions, at times using cognitive behavioral therapy to help him “cover issues related to his emotions and to help develop insight about his crime and past behavior.”

But when the commission denied Abrams in 2020, it reiterated its same rationale in 2019. They also recommended cognitive behavior therapy even though he’d just had the treatment.

A month after receiving the denial, Abrams filed his lawsuit against then chairman of the parole commission, Willis J. Fowler, claiming the commission continued to “reset the bar” for parole and the continued denials were a way to “seek retribution” for his crime. Through Sussman, Abrams declined an interview request citing his pending lawsuit and parole review.

‘Strong opposition, horrible crime’

In the years since Abrams filed his lawsuit, he’s been denied parole twice, most recently in April. But the litigation has uncovered information about the commission’s process. Sussman, his attorney, learned that the commissioners received no training on how to engage with incarcerated people who committed crimes as children during interviews, a key part of the new parole process.

Smith also admitted that she nor the commission had ever reviewed Abrams’s counseling record prior to his 2020 review, despite their recommendation that he see a psychologist. In 2019, a parole commission psychologist said Abrams wouldn’t pose a risk to the community, but didn’t recommend parole because he hadn’t addressed his “difficulties,” like a “distorted experience of women” and “neediness.” Finholt, the attorney, said that evaluations of people who enter prison as children rarely “give proper weight to the fact that this person’s entire adult development took place in a carceral setting.”

During her deposition, Smith was questioned about allegedly false information she included in Abrams’ parole summaries. Smith twice wrote that Abrams may have been responsible for the 1983 death of his younger brother, who died in a camper fire, and that the case remained open, despite an Iredell County Sheriff’s Office detective ruling the death accidental in 1984. Smith also wrote in her 2019 summary that Abrams planned to live with his mother on the same block as the victim’s mother, which was untrue, according to court filings.

Sussman said that these apparent misrepresentations are part of a systemic problem with the commission, which is often voting on 100 cases per day.

“There is no framework or analysis offered to measure whether somebody who entered prison as a 14-year-old, now, 40 years later, has sufficiently demonstrated that they are ready to come home,” Sussman said. “Can the parole commission just keep moving the goalposts, kind of arbitrarily, about what success looks like? We don’t think so. I don’t think most people would think that’s a good system to make some pretty important decisions.”

Opposition from the victim’s family also played a role in Abrams’ 2020 and 2022 parole denials.

In 2022, Fowler, the commision chair, noted “strong opposition” by the victim’s family stemming from Abrams’ “horrible crime.” “He was sentenced as an adult because of the magnitude of the crime that he committed,” Kim Goodman’s mother told WBTV last year. “We have not changed our minds in the fact that [if] he is paroled we feel very strongly that he will kill again.”

Members of the Goodman family have also circulated a petition opposing Abrams’ release that has received more than 100,000 signatures. They could not be reached via phone for comment.

Lost in translation

Abrams isn’t seeking immediate release, which is rarely granted by the commission. Instead, he’s asking to be enrolled in a mutual agreement parole program, or MAPP, which is considered an unofficial requirement for release. A MAPP participant will typically be freed within three years after participating in reentry programming.

But Abrams has completed so much programming that the commission won’t enroll him in a MAPP. Since 2012, Smith has refused to recommend him for the program because he’s “already doing everything that a MAPP could provide for him to do.”

In 2020, the warden of Orange Correctional Center, the prison system’s Central Region office, and the Department of Adult Corrections MAPP director, recommended Abrams be enrolled in a MAPP. In her recommendation, the warden noted Abrams’ favorable assessments and “positive progression through the system.”

But that year, Fowler told Abrams that a MAPP wouldn’t be appropriate since he was already on work release and was going out in the community.

In his deposition, Fowler admitted that the only way he would have supported a MAPP is if Abrams had “fallen back, so to speak, had violated a rule, or had not been as successful as he previously had been.”

Fowler retired from the parole commission last year and could not be reached via phone for comment.

The commission is now headed by Darren Jackson, a former judge and state legislator.

In March, Sussman filed a motion for summary judgment asking the court to rule in Abrams’ favor. He’s argued the parole process in North Carolina is “arbitrary and capricious,” worse than it was before Hayden, and that parole commissioners “receive and rely on material misrepresentations and omissions.”

“The people who are engaging with him and who are responsible for his safety and the safety of others clearly feel like he does not present any sort of risk when he’s outside of the walls,” Sussman said. “And so something is missing in translation when the parole commission can take a quick look at a file and then decide that he’s not a good candidate.”

The commission is represented by Sonya Calloway-Durham, an attorney with the North Carolina Department of Justice. In her response to Sussman’s motion, she said that Shaun Hayden, the plaintiff in Hayden v. Keller, was sentenced to life for a non-homicide offense and therefore the ruling in Hayden and other relevant cases don’t apply to Abrams because he was convicted of murder.

Calloway-Durham also claimed that the facts Abrams presented in his suit were “mere conjecture or speculation, simply immaterial, inadmissible, based upon Plaintiff’s mistaken beliefs,” and that Abrams was simply relitigating Hayden.

But Sussman said that “the undisputed facts that came up during litigation showed that the Hayden remedy was not operating as intended.”

A spokesperson with the North Carolina Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the suit.

A changed process

The parole process would likely be changed again if the court rules in Abrams’ favor. The process coming into constitutional compliance would not only benefit Abrams but more than 100 people in the state like him who are incarcerated for crimes they committed as children.

As Abrams awaits a judge’s decision in his case — and a decision in his latest parole review, which began in May — Jackson, the parole commission chair, has begun to fight the release of commission records to attorneys assisting people eligible for parole under Hayden and eligible for relief through the JSRB. Calloway-Durham has filed motions to intervene in the release of records on behalf of Jackson in superior courts in multiple counties, according to attorneys.

In one motion obtained by WFAE, Jackson claims the commission files are confidential and not public record. Jackson cited a 1996 legal opinion from the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office and state and federal court rulings that “have routinely rejected the notion that there exists a due process right to access parole records.”

Jackson did not respond to an email from WFAE requesting for comment.

Attempts to block access to parole commission records are an extraordinary move, considering Wake County Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway signed off on the release of files and that requesting and obtaining these files was routine. It could also thwart efforts by attorneys to advocate for their clients.

The Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the commission’s attempt to halt the release of records.

It’s unclear whether the parole commission will prevail in their attempts to withhold those files.

“It would be pretty devastating to not be able to get the basic information I need to do my job and to do right by my client,” Finholt said.